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Friday, October 12, 2012

Pitch Woes

So I've been trying to come up with a snappy pitch for a contest this weekend. (See the official Hook, Line, and Sinker Contest announcement here.) It's been a struggle to put it mildly. I started by taking bits and pieces from my query letter, half a sentence here, a phrase here. Ugh, that got me nowhere. Why was I torturing myself? I had the query letter, done, finished, complete. It had produced results. Why did I need a pitch? I wasn't planning to use one. I'm not one to attend writer's conferences. Too shy. Can't take time out to travel. They are kinda rare in Indiana. So why?

Well, it's good practice for one. When those well-intentioned people ask 'what's your book about' a pitch would give me something to spew out. Plus, truthfully, it was a challenge. I wanted to see if I come up with something. I do love a challenge.

Back to the drawing board. A change of direction and help from a beta reader (You know who you are, thanks tons!), several more revisions, and I might have something I can live with. Still, I'll take any suggestions I can get. If you dear readers have better thoughts, please put them in the comments. Whether I make the contest window or press send a second too late, now I'll have a pitch.

Hook for my YA fantasy, Dodge the Sun: They didn’t have nursery-rhyming cannibals or super-sized possums on her farm—only cows. A deteriorating
shield forces Little Bit to evade lethal radiation from the sun while she
searches for New Chicago. Oh, and the mage back home forgot to mention she
isn’t a hero, or even human—she started life as a rabbit.

The contest also requires one super stand alone sentence. So far I'm torn between two possibilities, which I must decide soon because the contest is tomorrow morning.

Line 1: Better to be a corpse
brought back to life, a Frankenstein monster of bits and pieces.

Line 2: If Markus didn’t
comprehend whether she was woman or beast, soulless or filled with grace, no
one could.Edit: I made it into the contest and I used Line 1 with the correction of Frankenstein's monster. (Thanks, Lori!) The results of the first round judging will be Tuesday afternoon--October 16th.